Growing vertically in O.C.

Erik Cutter, managing director of Alegría Farm, maintains 120 towers of stacked hydroponic planters on about a half acre of land (soon to be a full acre) in the Great Park. He grows fruit, leafy greens, vegetables and medicinal herbs, working with grower/shipper Orange County Produce LLC.

Alegría Farm's vertical units are made of six to eight stacked interlocking pots, each holding about three to six plants rooted in coconut fiber. The towers are anchored at the bottom by a five-gallon pot planted with beets or kale. Drip lines run along the tops of the towers, using timers to disperse only enough water to trickle down through the containers and sufficiently feed the plants at the bottom.

“We're doing 52 plants in two square feet,” says Cutter, 56. He hopes to teach the public how to grow for themselves in tight spaces.

Up in Brea, Chef Adam Navidi also grows basil, cilantro, spinach and other herbs and greens vertically inside a small portion of his giant Future Foods Farms greenhouses. He cultivates organic produce without pesticides using aquaponic growing systems, which rely on fish waste being converted into nutrients that infuse the water and nourish the plants.

The vertical units are 6- to 12-foot-tall food-grade pipes with about 10 plants sprouting from small holes. Water rises through the pipes via a siphoning system.

Navidi, 40, says when he discovered aquaponics, a light went off.

“This was the most natural, symbiotic relationship with growing food,” he says.

OCEANSIDE On Famgro Farms, there are no rows of crops in sun-drenched soil. Its leafy greens are grown in dirtless flats, stacked inside an Oceanside warehouse. They are nurtured under the magenta glow of LED lights without any pesticides, herbicides or animal products.

And the farmer? That would be Steve Fambro, an electrical engineer, whose previous project was an energy-efficient car.

Fambro's company – the name is a combination of his family name and “grow” – exited its test, or beta, phase and “went live” over the summer. He joins a coterie of local farmers who use variations of vertical horticulture and hydroponics or aquaponics to produce fresh produce while conserving increasingly precious land, water and energy.

Fambro, 46, says his greens will be coming to Orange County grocery stores in the first quarter of 2014, though he declined to specify where. They're available now in San Diego-area Whole Foods and other natural-food markets, and Famgro has sold its produce to some O.C. and San Diego restaurants and catering services.

A 4-ounce package of his sweet kale retails for about $3.99 – “on market for organic premium produce,” Fambro says. He adds that Famgro's ongoing research and development is focused on lowering the cost – using or developing whatever tools are needed – in order to make their food affordable.

LED-enabled agriculture is just coming out of its infancy, says Heiner Lieth, a professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis.

“Quite a few companies are starting up and making business out of essentially this area of food production,” Lieth explains. He adds that although farming this way may have been possible in the past, it was also cost-prohibitive. But advances in lighting technology – more efficient LEDs with higher outputs at lower costs have changed that part of the equation over the past two years.

The search for more efficient farming will only become more critical in coming years. The world's population is expected to balloon from 7 to about 9 billion people by 2050. Meanwhile, growth in agriculture production has been slowing, according to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Agriculture already uses 11 percent of the world's land surface for crop production and 70 percent of all water drawn from aquifers, streams and lakes. Water is getting scarcer as its cost rises, especially in Southern California. The U.N. report predicts that increases in agricultural output will likely come from ramping up production on existing farmland along with adoption of sustainable land-management practices and more efficient use of irrigation water.

Fambro has attacked these issues with the analytical eye of an engineer. He honed his ability to dissect systems and optimize for efficiency while making a powerful DNA synthesizer at San Diego biotech firm Illumina Inc. and building an electric vehicle at Aptera Motors Inc., the Carlsbad company Fambro started in his garage.

“We control the temperature, we control the airflow, we control the light,” Fambro says of his self-contained “macro-farm” units, where he closely tracks his crops from seedlings to full-grown greens via a computer system. “The computer tells me when it's going be harvested because we understand all of those variables so well now.”

Each rectangular farm unit takes up roughly the same square footage of a Prius, but rises about a dozen feet high. They're stacked with horizontal beds of hydroponically grown sweet kale, pac choi, microgreens, arugula, basil and other leafy greens planted in natural fibers (Fambro won't disclose the specific material). The roots are fed with nutrient-rich water.

Arrays of custom-built red and blue light-emitting diode (LED) lights shine down on each bed, fixed beneath the row above. The lighting system singles out the two hues the leafy greens need most. The energy efficient LEDs are also cooler than normal artificial lights. That keeps the units compact and lets them sit close to the plants.

Fambro says the system uses about 3 percent of the water, 1 percent of the land and a fraction of the labor of traditional farming. He also says that the energy needed to grow 20 servings of some of Famgro's greens is equivalent to what's needed to heat a 10-minute shower.

Fambro wants to branch out to other produce. He envisions his farms near population centers, so they can provide people with locally grown affordable fresh produce.

“I'm about producing local, affordable, better-than-organic food to everybody using whatever combinations of technology we develop to achieve that mission,” he says.

He also sees the value in such self-contained farms being placed near fulfillment hubs for delivery services increasingly being offered by companies such as Amazon and Google.

“All of them have one easy thing – frozen and dry goods that can be warehoused somewhere else,” Fambro says. “But they all will face an expansion problem unless they have some means of getting fresh greens locally.”

Steve Fambro, founder and CEO of Famgro Farms, holds a kale plant grown indoors under LED lights at his facility in Oceanside. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Steve Fambro, founder and CEO of Famgro Farms, poses with a bunch of sweet kale grown indoors under LED lights at his facility in Oceanside. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Produce grows under LED lights indoors at Famgro Farms in Oceanside. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Sweet kale grown at Famgro Farms is packaged and ready for shipment. EUGENE GARCIA, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

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